by David Dalton ‧ RELEASE DATE: Aug. 11, 1997
Let the reader be forewarned, El Sid is often obscene, violent and disturbing, but then, so was the life of its protagonist;...
Wildly uneven but ultimately compelling, Dalton's chronicle of Sid Vicious's (John Simon Ritchie) years as the bassist in the Sex Pistols covers little new factual ground but offers a fresh angle on a widely misunderstood young man.
Dalton's interest is in more than just telling of Sid's decline and fall. Instead, he places punk in its cultural and historical context, with the sun slowly setting on England's empire, widespread unemployment, and aimless youth like Sid wandering London's King's Road. Enter entrepreneur and lounge lizard Malcolm McClaren, who opens a boutique called Sex to cater to the jaded youths and then forms the Sex Pistols to promote his wares. Using the cerebral, charismatic, homeless Johnny Rotten (Lydon) as the centerpiece of his band, McClaren finds Lydon bringing his friend Sid along for the ride. The thought-driven Rotten and action-oriented Vicious give a jump-start to punk music, and the rest, as they say, is history. While Dalton (who has written biographies of Janis Joplin, Jim Morrison, and other pop cult figures) does a fine job of showing how the disparate personalities of McClaren, Lydon, and Sid played off one another, with Lydon being too smart to fall into the trap that killed Sid, the author relies throughout the book on the strange technique of presenting the bassist in, presumably, his own words in boxed quotes randomly placed throughout the text. And while Dalton tries all along to approximate the Cockney slang he supposes Sid must have spoken, a prison letter from Sid included in the book belies his conceit and his underestimation of Sid's intelligence. Still, Sid's presence in the book is ultimately what tells the story of the Sex Pistols.
Let the reader be forewarned, El Sid is often obscene, violent and disturbing, but then, so was the life of its protagonist; at least the typical glamorization of Sid Vicious is avoided.Pub Date: Aug. 11, 1997
ISBN: 0-312-15520-4
Page Count: 240
Publisher: St. Martin's
Review Posted Online: May 19, 2010
Kirkus Reviews Issue: June 15, 1997
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by Elie Wiesel & translated by Marion Wiesel ‧ RELEASE DATE: Jan. 16, 2006
The author's youthfulness helps to assure the inevitable comparison with the Anne Frank diary although over and above the...
Elie Wiesel spent his early years in a small Transylvanian town as one of four children.
He was the only one of the family to survive what Francois Maurois, in his introduction, calls the "human holocaust" of the persecution of the Jews, which began with the restrictions, the singularization of the yellow star, the enclosure within the ghetto, and went on to the mass deportations to the ovens of Auschwitz and Buchenwald. There are unforgettable and horrifying scenes here in this spare and sombre memoir of this experience of the hanging of a child, of his first farewell with his father who leaves him an inheritance of a knife and a spoon, and of his last goodbye at Buchenwald his father's corpse is already cold let alone the long months of survival under unconscionable conditions.
Pub Date: Jan. 16, 2006
ISBN: 0374500010
Page Count: 120
Publisher: Hill & Wang
Review Posted Online: Oct. 7, 2011
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Jan. 15, 2006
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by Chris Gardner with Quincy Troupe ‧ RELEASE DATE: June 1, 2006
Well-told and admonitory.
Young-rags-to-mature-riches memoir by broker and motivational speaker Gardner.
Born and raised in the Milwaukee ghetto, the author pulled himself up from considerable disadvantage. He was fatherless, and his adored mother wasn’t always around; once, as a child, he spied her at a family funeral accompanied by a prison guard. When beautiful, evanescent Moms was there, Chris also had to deal with Freddie “I ain’t your goddamn daddy!” Triplett, one of the meanest stepfathers in recent literature. Chris did “the dozens” with the homies, boosted a bit and in the course of youthful adventure was raped. His heroes were Miles Davis, James Brown and Muhammad Ali. Meanwhile, at the behest of Moms, he developed a fondness for reading. He joined the Navy and became a medic (preparing badass Marines for proctology), and a proficient lab technician. Moving up in San Francisco, married and then divorced, he sold medical supplies. He was recruited as a trainee at Dean Witter just around the time he became a homeless single father. All his belongings in a shopping cart, Gardner sometimes slept with his young son at the office (apparently undiscovered by the night cleaning crew). The two also frequently bedded down in a public restroom. After Gardner’s talents were finally appreciated by the firm of Bear Stearns, his American Dream became real. He got the cool duds, hot car and fine ladies so coveted from afar back in the day. He even had a meeting with Nelson Mandela. Through it all, he remained a prideful parent. His own no-daddy blues are gone now.
Well-told and admonitory.Pub Date: June 1, 2006
ISBN: 0-06-074486-3
Page Count: 320
Publisher: Amistad/HarperCollins
Review Posted Online: May 19, 2010
Kirkus Reviews Issue: March 15, 2006
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